Penguins of Sparrow Cove
Being one of those people who puts off scheduling things till the last possible moment, George and I had been left with the option of no tour or a 1300 trip to Sparrow Cove Penguin Rookery. At the time I booked this, I wasn’t aware of two things
1) we could have taken an early tender in and taken a cab to a different rookery for a lot less than the tour leaving us with a nice hike back
2) 1300 meant that there was absolutely no way of also seeing Port Stanley as it was a long tender ride
3) there were shops with yarn in Port Stanley.
BTW – the Falklands, UK has a normal population of about 2500 augmented with British Military to to the tune of a few thousand more. In fact, at times there are more military than there are locals. Everything (other than fish and lamb) arrives by plane. Argentina may be geographically close but as you might guess, it is not a trading partner with the result that little in the way of supplies or food stuffs comes by sea.
The leading industry is fishing followed closely by tourism. The sheep also count and out-number the people by about 24:1.
Specifically Gentoo Penguins are the main breed here.
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On the way out – or almost on the way out it seems like we needed a bit of fuel. The barge managed to hit the davit on the port side of the ship for the mid-ship lifeboat/tender. Not pretty – crumpled arms and all. Not an issue from the point of view of having enough capacity to get everyone off – but a significant issue in terms of having a rather large twisted hunk of metal/crane sticking out from the side of the ship and being an issue for sailing.
We wound up being there till 0400 in the morning till the crew managed to get off enough of the mess that we could sail. The tender was left in Port Stanley.
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